Now
Gary sat on the floor of his kitchenette, surrounded by wrappers and boxes - all of them empty. He licked the inside of a wrapper that used to hold a granola bar, dug out the tiny crumbs with his tongue. All gone.
He was hungrier than ever.
He could feel his stomach distend. He knew he was full, fuller than he'd ever been in life. It didn't seem to matter. Being among the dead meant always being hungry, obviously. It meant this gnawing inside of you that you could never quench. It explained so much. He had wondered - in his old life - why they had attacked people, even people they knew, people they loved. Maybe they had tried to stop themselves. The hunger was just too great. The need to eat, to consume, was awesome and frightening. Was this what he had consigned himself to?
Even as he considered this he was rising to his feet, his hands reaching for the cupboard. His fingers were clumsy with hunger but they obeyed him enough to get the door open. The cupboard was almost empty and he felt a gulf open inside him, a desperate dark place that needed to be filled. Food. He needed food.
He'd thought he was done with the things of life. That had been the point. The age of humanity was over and the time of Homo mortis had come... the hospital had been in chaos, dying patients rising to wound the healthy, policemen discharging their weapons in the halls, the lights flickering as the generators ran down. He had walked out the emergency room doors with a laundry cart full of expensive equipment and nobody had even tried to stop him.
He found a box of rigatoni, took it down from the shelf. The stove didn't work. How was he going to cook it? His thumbnail dug into the carton's flap anyway. Wishful thinking.
There had been no other option. You either joined them or you fed them - and they didn't stop coming, you could run and hide but they were everywhere. There were more of them every day and less places to turn to, fewer sections of the city that the National Guard could claim were safely quarantined. Martial law. Vans cruising the street picking up bodies, the horrible penalties for hygiene offenses, for refusing to give up your dead. It kept getting worse. The Mayor had given up, they said. Certainly he had left the public eye. The only thing on television was a public service announcement from the CDC about the proper way to trepan your loved ones. Fires burning everywhere outside the police lines. Smoke and screaming. Like September 11th but on every block of the city at once.
Gary pried a noodle out of the box and stuffed it between his lips. Maybe he'd suck on it until it got soft.
Maybe it didn't have to be so bad, Gary had thought. If you were going to die anyway, die and come back... the worst part was losing your intellect, your brainpower. Everything else he could do without but he couldn't handle being a mindless corpse wandering the earth forever. But maybe it didn't have to be that way. The stupidity of the dead had to be from organic brain damage, right, brought on by anoxia. The time between when you stopped breathing and you woke up again, that was when it must happen, with every second more brain cells would suffocate and die, the critical juncture between thinking rational human and dumb dead animal. If you could keep yourself oxygenated, a respirator in your lungs, a dialysis machine to keep your blood moving, carrying that critical oxygen to your head... everything on battery power in case the grid went down...
His teeth bit down hard, unwilling to wait for saliva to break the noodle down. He chewed vigorously, crunching the rigatoni into fragments as hard and sharp as little knives. Put another noodle in his mouth. Another.
One day he'd watched a government helicopter, the first one he'd seen in a week, come down with a noise like a car crash somewhere in the park. For hours he watched the black smoke rise from the site, watched the tips of orange flames dancing above the skyline. Nobody went to the rescue. Nobody went to put out the fire. He knew the time had come.
With a start he realized what he was doing and spat the noodle fragments in the dry sink. With probing fingers he dug around inside his lips, feeling a hundred tiny lacerations there. He could have really injured himself - but there'd been no pain.
He needed to get out of his apartment. He needed to find more food. Real food.
Meat.